Pierce O’Farrill, a survivor of the Aurora, Colorado massacre, has a message for the gunman: “I forgive you.” O’Farrill was sitting in the third row, one seat from the aisle near the exit door where the shooter entered.

“It was like I could feel a cloud of evil walking into the theater,” he tells CNN’s Randi Kaye. “When I saw him, literally everything almost seemed like it stopped.”

O’Farrill was hit three times, twice in his left foot and once in his upper arm, where the bullet shattered the bone. He dove to the ground and covered his head. He tasted blood in his mouth. When the shooting stopped for a moment he tried to make it to the exit, but he collapsed.

His head was inches from the gunman’s boot. “I could feel him walking around me,” he says. Pierce, who is deeply spiritual, started praying and made peace with dying. Then he started thinking about his brother and father and realized he didn’t want them to blame god for his death.

At the moment he says the gunman walked away. “There is no doubt in my mind that god saved me,” he says. “I believe that he saved me out of that theater so that I can just show the world that there is light.”

While O’Farrill says he hopes the shooter gets life in prison, he believes that “every person on this world deserves forgiveness.”

soundoff(One Response)

RobShapiro

Glad he lived, but to claom that 'god saved him' is the ultimate in hubris. Why didnt god save the people who died? Surely they prayed as they breathed their last. In reality, it was chance that saved Pierce. He was lucky that the bullets hit him in the arm and foot rather than in his head or heart. Tell the parents of the victims who died that god saved you, but apparently they simply didnt pray hard enough.